Personal Trainer Marketing

Personal Trainer Marketing and Tips and Tactics to grow your fitness business

Do you ever wonder “what the best personal training marketing tactics are?” If you have, then keep reading.

You’ll find this site full of awesome tips.

The Personal Training Marketing systems I’m about to share with you will take your business to a whole new level quickly. That’s because the stuff you’re about to learn are things that your competitors will never think of doing.

Is your personal fitness training business operating at full capacity? By that, I mean are you getting everything you can out of your personal training business?

I want you to put all your preconceived ideas about fitness marketing to one side for a moment and let me tell you about some killer ideas that you probably never thought of. These are going to be some way out of the box personal trainer marketing tactics – but they work. And that’s all you really need to know.

As a fitness trainer myself I’ve had a lot of experience with good and bad fitness marketing strategies. I’ve tried a bunch of things that really failed. But over time (and by doing a lot of trial and error) I also discovered some KILLER marketing tactics that worked like crazy and no one was even using them.

Secret Marketing Plan for Personal Trainers

I felt like I knew a little secret that no one else knew. And now that I teach fitness trainers the secrets and shortcuts to getting clients I get to share all of my hardcore fitness marketing systems and strategies with fitness pros who want to make a killing. Like I said, these fitness marketing tactics you’re about to learn are really out of the box and things that most personal trainers never think of.

Okay, you’re probably wondering why I have created this site in the first place. Well, the truth is the average personal trainer income is under $35,000/year. I should know I was making $28,000/year for a long time. It sucked.

But I soon discovered some personal training marketing methods that took my income from under 30K well into the six figure mark. While it didn’t happen overnight, it did happen pretty quickly and it totally changed my personal training studio for good.

Before I give you my top three marketing tactics I should warn you that the strategies you’re about to learn may seem pretty far out. But you gotta trust me. This stuff works. It works for many of my top-coaching clients and it will work for you (if you put them into action).

On this blog you’ll find over 163 marketing techniques to help you take your fitness business to massive success. These are things that will help you achieve total financial freedom.

While I can’t go into all 163 marketing tips here, I will give you the top three that I like and that have worked really great for me.

3 Effective Marketing Tips Most Trainers Overlook

1. The first tip you’ll want to know is this. Focus ONLY on direct response marketing. Forget about traditional advertising or image building. That type of advertising is crap in my opinion and you can’t even track to see if it got your any new clients.

But direct response marketing is by far the best strategy ever because you can track it and hold it accountable.

The formula for direct response is AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. That means your marketing message should have a strong compelling headline and get the reader’s attention. Then the copy should capture the person’s interest and suck them into reading your message. Next you’ve got to evoke desire. Get the reader to want your service. And finally ask them to take action. You want a deliberate call to action and not just an implied offer.

Really though, hiring a group of trainers to work for you is where you want to end up. Telling you that you can be extremely successful only focusing on marketing a few hours a day would be a lie. Marketing is the essential part of making your fitness business successful.

2. Leverage your time. One way I did this was to stop being the trainer and start being the marketer. You are better off hiring a group of personal trainers to work for you so you can focus your attention on the real important stuff like dialing in your fitness marketing systems.

There are other ways that you can leverage your time if you are not in a place to hire other trainers to work for you. The first is by devoting a certain amount of time to focus on marketing every single day. This is time where you do not do anything that is outside the bounds of lead generation, contact or sign up.

Really though, hiring a group of trainers to work for you is where you want to end up. Telling you that you can be extremely successful only focusing on marketing a few hours a day would be a lie. Marketing is the essential part of making your fitness business successful.

3. Use online marketing methods, too. Don’t just run ads, send postcards, and lead boxes. Those are all fine, but you should also focus on online fitness marketing systems like craigs list and facebook client getting systems. One of the best ways to use craigslist is to post ads for ‘human billboards’. Basically this tactics is all about getting 20 people to pay you only $10 per work out (this works best in group training sessions of 4-6) BUT they have to promise to refer you at least one lead each week. The people you get from these human billboards will be your ‘regular’ paying clients.

Like I said there are over 163 ways to get clients on this website. But the foundation is really based on the three tips up above.

Viral Marketing

Ok, I feel the need to mention a few more fitness trainer marketing techniques that can be used by personal trainers. Don’t get me wrong if you focus on those three tips above you will have a successful marketing strategy. The one thing that doesn’t get discussed in detail very often is the effective use of a Facebook viral marketing campaign.

So, first of all what is viral marketing?

I am sure you have heard the name before but let me break it down for you. Viral marketing places its fate in the contact that your current clients have with others. If you post something that is interesting and worthwhile to 10 people on Facebook chances are that each of those 10 are going to have 2-3 repost it. Now you have 20-30 viewing your content. If each of those 30 has 3 friends who repost it you now have 90 people viewing content you have created.

Ok, so how does this work for a personal trainer?

I am going to give you a model viral marketing scenario and you tell me how it doesn’t help you.

Everything you need to know prior to using Facebook

If you are effectively using SEO content you already have a blog or website. You should have the Facebook buttons installed in your website, if not it’s ok, go do it now. I can wait…

Seriously… I’ll wait

Next your Personal Training page should have the information for your blog or website so that people never have to visit to sign up with it (say hello lead generation). This is called become a fan. This is one of the best things integrated into Facebook because people never have to leave Facebook to sign up with your website.

So now all of your internet communications are going through Facebook. Your website promotions, deals of the day and your blog all post to your Facebook account. People will automatically see this information just for clicking the “like” button on your page.

But this isn’t viral marketing, is it?

No not yet. But these elements must be in place if you hope to have something go viral and really produce a response that is going to get you a large number of leads.

The Marketing Campaign

I know I have already told you the importance of focusing on direct response marketing. This is how it works. You create a direct response marketing promotion. One of my favorite programs is a first session free program. It is relatively cheap on your side and it is easy to do. The other ones that seem to get a lot of response are the 21 Day Fat Burn for $21. Also the 2 week trial (paid) with meal plans included for free. Pick the one that works best for your business. If you have been marketing and tracking the success rate for your promotions you will know which one works already.

Next you create a clever post on your blog, your website and of course Facebook about the great promotion that you are having. Through Facebook you tag every current client that you have. The text could read something like this “Hey everyone, This week only every new user who “likes” our page and this post will be entered in a raffle to win a 21 Day Fat Burn for $21 bucks. This includes free meal plans with the program. Tell your friends and family to “like” this post so that they don’t miss out!”

The wonders of Facebook

Guess what, your current clients don’t have to do anything. By tagging them in the post you have already posted the contest to their wall. The nice thing about it is that they can still choose to “share” it again and get even more people to see it. This is personal training marketing at it’s best. Plus it’s low cost stuff that produces leads and prospects.

Now all you have to do is sit back and watch the leads roll in. It took you all of 45 seconds (well probably a little longer, good messages take time to craft) to generate a large amount of leads in a short time span and with almost no effort on your part. Although you should follow up with other posts referring to the contest so that you can generate a higher volume of leads.

What’s also nice is that everyone who participated in this promotion is now a member of your Facebook community. Every single time you have a promotion they will see it. When a member decides to post those before and after photos guess who will see it? These people will. Having people choose to like your page as an eligibility requirement gives you the ability to get much needed exposure. The next time that they think about signing up for a gym or seeing a personal trainer, they will already have you in mind.

Lead Management

This is where the marketing game gets a little less exciting. Lead management is a crucial aspect of how you market your business. If I told you anything else I would be lying to you. Lead management is boring but essential.

Let’s take the direct response viral Facebook campaign that we detailed earlier.

Say you generated 300 likes. We can safely assume that half of these are going to be unusable. They don’t live in the area, or their contact information is wrong in Facebook, whatever it may be we can assume half of whatever you generate will be useless. Only one person is going to win the so that leaves you with 149 people who you now know are interested in the promotion that you just offered.

The key here is not to let these leads go to waste. It happens so often that personal trainers hold promotions like these and then the remaining good leads fall by the wayside. This goes back to not focusing enough time on marketing. There are only so many hours in a day and unless you plan on working 80 hour weeks you should really consider hiring additional trainers, but that’s been said already.

Not utilizing the leads that you have is the biggest waste of resources in marketing. So what do you do with the remaining leads?

You need to market to them. It seems simple that all you do is market to these leads. But how do you organize them once you have sent them marketing material? This is where lead organization comes into play. If you don’t organize them and track the responses that you get to your offers you will never be able to have the epic personal training business that you dream of because all your efforts are being thrown in the garbage by wasting leads.

There are two ways that you can manage your personal training leads.

1. Old fashioned binder with print outs. Make sure that you keep up with managing this type of information as keeping a killer lead list will make you a success.

2. Get technical. Use programs like Excel to help you manage your lead list. With automatic sorting and calculations it will make your job a lot easier. There are even software programs out there that are designed to help you manage your marketing. If you need have the extra capital to invest in, they may be worth looking at.

Handling Rejection

Marketing is all about rejection. When you get better acquainted with your marketing promotions, platforms and response rates you will learn, like I did, to expect people to say no.

In fact paying attention to the rate of rejection that your marketing materials receive is a key element in the marketing plan. If you ran your first direct response viral marketing campaign through Facebook with a 21 Day Fat Burn program with free meal plans included, and got a total of 20 likes you have just learned some valuable lessons about marketing to your area.

The next time you attempt this type of marketing campaign you should use a different promotion. Or maybe it was not the promotion at all. The time frame may not have been long enough. If 1 week didn’t work out maybe you should try 2 weeks or a month next time. There are so many things that you can learn from the market rejecting your attempts to get them interested in your business. Tracking the rejection of your marketing ideas is the fastest and easiest way to build better marketing messages.

Putting it all together

Fitness marketing is not rocket science. Thinking outside of the box is the best way to make sure that you are a success. If the same old boring marketing tactics are not working for you then it is time to shake things up with a new idea. The next time you’re looking for some killer out-of-the-box marketing strategies be sure to come to this blog and look around. Odds are you’ll find a bunch of new and creative ways to get more clients and make more money.

Remember that direct response marketing plans are going to be far more successful and result in more clients then a program that involves branding ever will be. If you focus on lead generating direct response scenarios you will find yourself on the road to success.

Find the time to focus on marketing. If you cannot handle all of the duties involved in marketing your personal training, think about hiring another trainer, or rather a group of trainers that you can market to increase your annual earnings.

Make the internet work for you. Facebook especially is one that can do the majority of the legwork for you. Viral marketing strategies that are managed properly can result in an overabundance of leads. Since all you need to do is create one killer message, this is a preferable method to market yourself online.

Oh and speaking of Facebook… I almost forgot. One simple and easy to use a marketing tactic is to get all your clients to “check in” when they come to your training studio or fitness boot camp. This is a really easy way to expose your business to their friends.

Sweet, right?

Now, once you have your leads, manage them properly. Wasting leads or taking rejection personally is only going to make your business suffer.

If you can follow this prescription for success, your personal training business will become a hardcore empire.

Committed to your success,

Bedros Keuilian

Bedros is a sought after fitness marketing expert and the top personal trainer marketing business coach to thousands of fitness professionals worldwide.

Search for:

READY TO TAKE THE LEAP?

Accelerate your growth, and take your fitness business to massive success and profits with advance coaching, mentoring, and masterminds.

* The advertised results of the success stories on this page and throughout this site are only typical of people who worked really hard and followed every fitness marketing tactic I've outlined in the products they purchase from me. Results may vary.